Let us come together as one humane family, help educate to liberate and advocate for the humane rights of all people upon Mother Earth!”And you will know the truth, and that very truth will make you free."~John 8:32

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Read: The Howls of a Fading Species

From: "moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG" <moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG>To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORGSent: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 9:40:18 PMSubject: The Howls of a Fading Species

One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor tothe Supreme Court is something approaching a deathrattle for this profoundly destructive force inAmerican life.

It's hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currentlybeing scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies whoare leading the charge against the nomination. NewtGingrich, who never needed a factual basis for hisravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a"Latina woman racist," apparently unaware of hisincoherence in the "Latina-woman" redundancy in thisdefamatory characterization.

Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was "notnecessarily" smart, thus managing to get the toxicissue of intelligence into play in the case of a womanwho graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went onto get a law degree from Yale and has more experienceas a judge than any of the current justices had at thetime of their nominations to the court.

It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievementsufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry.It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplishedenough.

The amount of disrespect that has spattered thenomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She isspoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowestof the low. Rush Limbaugh - now there's a genius! - hascompared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination ofDavid Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. "How cana president nominate such a candidate?" Limbaugh asked.

Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of LaRaza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In thecrazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mereexistence of La Raza should make decent people run forcover. La Raza is "a Latino K.K.K. without the hoodsand the nooses," said Tom Tancredo, a Republican formercongressman from Colorado.

Here's the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous andself-righteous white males of the right are allconcerned about racism. They're so concerned thatthey're fully capable of finding it in places where itdoesn't for a moment exist. Not just finding it, butbeing outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, theytell us, this racism is a bad thing!

Are we supposed to not notice that these are thetribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthywaves of racial demagoguery. I don't remember hearingtheir voices or the voices of their intellectual heroeswhen the Republican Party, as part of its Southernstrategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled theDemocratic Party because the Democrats had becomeinsufficiently hostile to blacks.

Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reaganwent out of his way to kick off his general electioncampaign in 1980 with a salute to states' rights in, ofall places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the sitewhere three young civil rights workers had beensnatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?

We've heard ad nauseam Ms. Sotomayor's comments -awkwardly stated but hardly racist - about what shebrings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have weever heard the awful, hateful position on race offeredup by William F. Buckley, the right's ultimateintellectual champion? He felt comfortable declaring,in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decisionordering the desegregation of public schools, thatwhites had every right to discriminate against blacksbecause whites belonged to "the advanced race."

Right-wing howls of protest? I think not.

Ms. Sotomayor's nomination is a big deal because neverbefore in the history of the United States has anypresident nominated a Latina to the highest court. Onlytwo blacks have ever been on the court, and the oneselected by a Republican has been like a thumb in theeye to most African-Americans.

The court is a living monument to America's longhistory of exclusion based on race, ethnic backgroundand gender. Where is the right-wing protest againstthat?

It was always silly to pretend that the election ofBarack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving intosome sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gendernirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. Thereis every reason to hope that we've improved as asociety to the point where the racial and ethniccraziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finallyhave a tough time finding any sort of foothold.

Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but theridiculousness of their posture is pretty widelyrecognized. Thus the desperate howling.

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